ABSTRACT
For some thirty years now, I have been arguing for the importance of the history of linguistics, and while not everyone has been convinced by the arguments, the climate of opinion has indeed changed. During the early 1970s, in the earlier stages of the institutionalization effort of the history of linguistics as a bona fide subject of instruction within linguistics proper, it seemed natural to make a strong appeal to the methodological soundness of linguistic historiography in order to render the subject respectable in the eyes of ‘real’ linguists for whom linguistics meant ‘theory’ (see Koerner 1972, 1976 as examples of this approach). This original attitude to matters historical might, at least initially, have had something to do with the success of Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics (1966), given that Chomsky was in a way combining theory with an interest in finding antecedents for what he was doing. Even though this type of ancestor hunt, an essentially presentist and unhistorical approach, was soon discredited, Chomsky’s incursions into the linguistic past made an engagement in this kind of activity appear legitimate for a number of North Americans during the late 1960s and early 1970s.1
